Bad Habit
by dysprositos
Summary: It's just a bad habit, that's all. And everybody has one. Warnings inside.


**Warnings: fairly graphic self-injury, blood, language.**

My beta, irite, really is the best. We need to declare a "beta appreciation day" and celebrate. I love to celebrate.

I do not own The Avengers.

* * *

It's just a bad habit, that's all. And everybody has one.

That's what he'd told Nat when she'd found him the first time, standing alone in the darkened locker room at SHIELD, blood streaming thick and viscous from the fresh gashes in his thighs.

There wasn't really any point in trying to deny it, or lying about what he'd been doing. The boxcutter he'd had clasped loosely in one hand kind of made that futile. And if that hadn't, the deer-in-the-headlights expression on his face probably did.

She'd surprised him, which was impressive. Not for her, not really. Nat was stealthy. But Clint liked to think he was hard to sneak up on. Not many people could do it.

Granted, he'd been distracted, so he tried not to hold his lapse in vigilance against himself.

He could forgive himself that.

Their helicopter had landed back at SHIELD after midnight, and Clint had headed straight for the showers. The water had washed away the grime from the mission, the smoke residue, the blood that was not his. It washed away all the evidence of everything that had gone wrong, of all the mistakes he'd made. It got rid of the evidence, but it couldn't actually _change _what had happened. That was permanent, final, inescapable, imprinted firmly into his brain.

And it wasn't fair, not really. That he could just waltz into these people's lives, firing arrows and bullets, an agent of chaos and destruction. He could just come in and take _everything _from them and leave, like he'd never been there at all. He'd go home afterwards, maybe watch television, have dinner, maybe call it an early night, whatever. But the people who'd died because he'd missed his shot by two inches? They were done. Over and ended, while he watched bad reality TV.

It ate at him.

He couldn't change what had happened, though. But he didn't have to. He just had to find a way to make it _feel_ better, as pathetic as that was. To get the weight off his chest so he could breathe again. It felt like he was cheating, and he hated himself because he was so weak that he _needed _to cheat, but that didn't stop him. He needed the release, to forget just for a little while.

Above all else, Clint was a ruthless pragmatist, and if it worked, well, that was good enough. He had a job to do, couldn't let something as asinine as his overactive conscience get in the way of that. If he could quiet its inanity even for a few minutes, he would.

He explained all of this to Nat. "This isn't the first time," he'd told her, and that was true. Christ, it had been _years_ at that point, at least fifteen years since the first time. Fifteen years, and it still _worked_, still kept him on his feet, so "_No_, this is _not _a 'problem.'"

And she'd dropped it.

Not forever, though. The next time a mission had gone south, she had followed him closely for hours, making small talk, making him buy her dinner, sticking around for a movie, just generally acting entirely unlike Natasha. It had taken him the better part of the night to figure out what she was doing and why. When he had, he hadn't been angry. He'd actually been amused.

"Nat, stop."

"Stop what?"

She did the I-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about thing really well, he'd give her that. But he was more perceptive than that, Christ, give him some damn credit. "You can go. I'm fine."

Natasha shrugged, dropping the act. "Yeah, for now. Gonna still be fine later?"

"Sure."

It was the truth, too. He didn't _always_ need to fall back on vices to get him through rough spots. Fuck, he hardly _ever _did it, maybe once or twice a year at the most. Still, Natasha leaned in close and scrutinized him before decided that, yes, he was being honest and not trying to ditch her so he could get down to business. Satisfied with what she saw, she'd departed for the night.

Eight months later, a mission had gone badly and Nat hadn't been able to stick close afterwards. She'd been stuck in medical, getting stitched back together after a knife fight with an Albanian. A knife fight that shouldn't have happened, except Clint hadn't been watching her position as closely as he should have and she'd been ambushed. Surprised.

That was unacceptable, and, well, vices _do _have their place. Their uses.

When she saw that bandage on the back of his hand a day later, she'd sighed and closed her eyes before asking, "So, when _was _the first time?"

That had been a very long time ago, more than 15 years ago, actually, back when he was just a kid, bumming around with the circus. And honestly? He didn't remember _why_. It seemed kind of strange, now that he was thinking about it, but he hadn't really marked the occasion as something huge and important in his mind. With a decade and half of time, it had faded with little to no objection from him.

Natasha hadn't seemed satisfied with his answer, but it was all he could give her, and when it became clear that he wasn't being reticent, just forgetful, she let it go.

After that, she never brought it up again. Explicitly, anyway. She just watched him. And time passed, and she watched, and they had an exceptionally long streak of good luck, and so he stopped doing it, and she stopped watching, and he'd actually thought that he was, well, 'better.'

For five years, he'd been fine. Five. Years.

But then...all of _this _had happened and now 'fine' was not a word he would be applying to himself anytime soon.

The official report, which had taken three weeks to come out, had said "fifteen." That is, fifteen people that he'd killed working for Loki. Of course, Clint personally liked to add in all the people who'd died in Manhattan as well, since Loki never would have made it that far in his plans without Clint's help. Plus there were the people who'd been killed on the helicarrier. So the 'actual' count was more like...four hundred and twenty one.

That was a lot of people.

And consequently, it seemed natural, what he was doing now. It just needed to be done, it was the solution to the problem, and if he'd caused the problem he could damn well fix it himself.

Dodging Nat had been the hard part, of course, because he suspected that she suspected, of course she _would_. She was a hard one to lie to, and she was next to impossible to avoid, but through some combination of luck and skill, Clint had managed to make his way home unaccompanied.

He locked the door behind him. And then the bathroom door, too, just to be safe. He stripped down to his boxers and took a few deep breaths.

Four hundred and twenty one was a lot of people, but it wasn't insurmountable.

He started low on his left arm, on the ventral side near the thumb joint. The knife was the one he'd had in his boot when he'd attacked the helicarrier. It was a personal favorite, actually, well balanced and so sharp that the blade practically faded into nothing at the edge. The grip was comfortable in his hand, familiar, and he pressed the blade down into his skin before pulling back quickly.

It stung. Burned, actually, but he ignored it, ignored the blood that bubbled to the surface and streamed down his hand and dripped onto the floor. He repositioned the blade, a quarter of an inch further up his arm and, gritting his teeth, repeated the action.

He managed to get to twenty before he ran out of room. He rotated his arm and started at the wrist again, this time moving up the dorsal side. He was methodical, each cut even in depth and length, and he worked his way up to his shoulder.

At sixty, Clint switched to his other arm, briefly noting how hard it was to hold the knife steady.

At eighty, he began to feel dizzy. Surveying his surroundings explained why.

There was a lot of blood. More than he'd expected. Drips and drops dotted the floor, the countertops, some had splashed into the tub. It was on the walls, somehow, painting red streaks on the white tile. There were tacky handprints on the towels, the shower curtain...his face. The rug was soaked, and bloody footprints tracked across the room, back and forth, evidence of the frenetic pacing he hadn't been able to stop once he'd started.

And the _smell_, oh God, how hadn't he noticed it before? The thick, coppery tang was so heavy he could practically _taste _it.

His stomach turned.

But he forced the nausea down, willing himself to continue. He was only at eighty, not even a quarter of the way done. He had to get through over three hundred more, so he couldn't get sidetracked. Not now.

At one hundred and ten, he began to think that he should have started at his ankles. Bending over to reach them now was making his head spin so badly that he could hardly keep count.

Somewhere around one hundred and twenty five (_one twenty six? seven?_), the pounding at the door started.

A few moments later came the yelling.

"Barton, open the damn door. I've been calling you for forty-five minutes! I know you're in there, I can hear your phone ringing!"

Hmm. So it was. But he'd left it on his bed, and he wasn't about to stop now to check his voicemail.

When Clint got to what he had decided he was going to call one hundred and thirty, he heard the distinct sound of his front door being kicked in, followed by Natasha's muffled cursing from his bedroom. "Fuck, what the fuck is he _doing_?"

Then the pounding started on the _bathroom _door and he lost count entirely. The knife slipped in his grip and dug deep into his right calf, just below the knee. For a moment, he stared at the wound, three inches long and half an inch deep, pouring blood down his leg, and wondered idly if maybe he could count that as more than one.

Or, maybe he shouldn't count it at all, since he hadn't been trying...

He straightened, vaguely aware that the pounding on the door was increasing dramatically in volume, as was Natasha's yelling. But moving so quickly had made the whole world cant to the right and so instead of moving to open the door and see what she wanted (like he'd intended) he actually just toppled over. He caught himself on the wall briefly, the friction between his skin and the tiles holding him up, but his balance was too fucked to stay that way and so he slid to the ground, leaving a wide swath of red on the wall behind him.

Natasha didn't really need him to open the door for her anyway, since she broke it down a moment later.

"Could've picked the lock, Nat," Clint tried to say, but all that came out was something consisting entirely of _m_ and _n _sounds. That was fine, as it turned out, because she wasn't listening anyway.

"Fuck, Clint," she breathed, standing framed in the doorway. "Shit, I should've known you were going to..."

Natasha trailed off, opting instead to cross into the bathroom. She tried to avoid the blood, but at this point, it was futile. She realized that fairly quickly and abandoned her effort, barreling in instead, grabbing the towel from the hook on the back of the door and approaching Clint cautiously. She knelt down next to him and used the towel to wipe away some of the blood and sweat so she could see the damage.

A cursory look (combined with the huge amount of blood surrounding them) told her all she needed to know, so she took out her cell phone.

Clint, who had been lying there passively and letting her examine him, rallied and became more animated. "No," he mumbled, fingers fumbling across the floor towards where he'd dropped the knife. "I'm only at a hundred and thirty, Nat, I'm not even halfway done..."

But she reached across him and picked the knife up, tossing it into the sink. "No, Clint. You're done. Trust me, you're done."

Clint wanted to argue, wanted to more than anything. Because leaving this undone, incomplete, left the weight on his chest, and he couldn't fucking _breathe_. But he was too tired to argue, too close to unconsciousness, and as he heard her make the call for an ambulance, all he could do was close his eyes and wait.

He woke up in the hospital, in restraints, wrapped in bandages, sore and aching.

Natasha was sitting next to his bed, watching him wake. When she was sure he was coherent, she said, "You almost died. Was that the point?"

His throat was dry, but he managed to rasp out, "No. Don't be stupid, Nat, this is just—"

She cut him off, gesturing at him, at the restraints, the bandages. "Don't even go there. This is more than a _bad habit_, Clint."

His only response was a non-committal, "Maybe."

* * *

I wanted to get out of my comfort zone a bit, and so this happened. This was...hard. Really hard. Like, took forever, almost deleted, still uncomfortable, awkward hard. So...I guess let me know what you think? Be gentle.


End file.
